[arjie]

Haha, what an end to an era on the brand. Some 16 years ago, my parents bought me the only XPS laptop I'd own: an XPS M1330 [0]. I've still got in a closet here, but I used it for eight years or so. Six years after purchase, it looks like it was still a pretty good machine[1] and had near perfect Linux compatibility. The real wonder for me was that the bootloaders for the Power button on that laptop and the MediaDirect button were separate, so I actually had it set up so that if I hit the MediaDirect button it would go to Ubuntu and the Power button would send it to Windows!

Pretty neat trick. The only thing is that something about the way the video framebuffer was set up when you hit the MediaDirect button made the GRUB interface laggy. After that, the kernel resets everything and all is well!

This particular laptop was part of the infamous batch of bad G84 series of Nvidia graphics chips. The BGA soldering on the GPUs would crack under thermal stress, but you could reflow it with a heat gun or using the oven (crazy for a semi-plastic device!). In my case, it happened early enough that XPS support replaced my motherboard a few times. They actually met me wherever I was with the part to replace the board and the tech would do it for me at home. Overall, that was the finest customer support experience I ever had. I'm a fickle guy, though. It wasn't enough to keep me with the brand and I eventually ended up with a Macbook.

It's funny. After posting this I googled my name and XPS M1330 and found a post where I was trying to boot off the SD card. I was fascinated by this idea back then that I could just carry my OS on an SD card and then people couldn't see any of my stuff unless they had that specific SD card: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/laptops-gene... . Sadly the XPS M1330 didn't work for that, but I think I did it with a USB stick (which is unfortunately more noticeable - back then they were bulky!).

0: https://web.archive.org/web/20150811070526/https://arjie.com...

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20150811065240/https://arjie.com...